Modern web-oriented software applications face increasing challenges with regard to scalability, including the need to handle extremely large volumes of data. For example, within a mobile chat system, the database tables that are needed to process messages have grown in size dramatically, such that the volume of a single table can become a limiting factor in the scalability of a particular application. A common approach to addressing this type of problem is the use of sharding, in which data is presented as multiple smaller databases or shards. These are some examples of the types of environments in which embodiments of the invention can be used.